Communication services, instant messaging tools, and other applications often provide users with presence information regarding the current availability of other users. However, such presence information is deficient in several ways. For example, a user's availability is typically characterized with respect to a limited number of situations, such as whether a user is active, idle, or offline. A user's level/degree of availability is also typically person agnostic, and is not based on communication history. The operation of some presence information systems raises privacy issues by exposing a user's context to other users with availability characterizations such as “on the phone” or “in his office.”